RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 08/09/10

The year is 2002, America has just woken up with the worst post dot.com hangover ever. Paul Krugman then, just as now, writes worthless op-eds for the NYT. And then, just as now, the Keynsian acolyte recommended excess spending as the solution to all of America problems. Only this one time, at band camp, Krugman went too far. If there is one thing that everyone can agree on, is that the Housing Bubble, is arguably the worst thing to ever happen to America, bringing with it such pestilence and locusts as the credit bubble, the end of free market capitalism, and the inception of American-style crony capitalism. Those who ignored it, even though it was staring them in the face, such as Greenspan and Bernanke, now have their reputation teetering on the edge of oblivion. So what can we say of those who openly endorsed it as a solution to America's problems? Enter exhibit A: New York Times, August 2, 2002, "Dubya's Double Dip?" Name the author: "The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar
slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates
and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the
Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a
morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this
recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household
spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as
Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing
bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." If you said Krugman, you win. Indeed, the idiocy of Keynesianism knew no bounds then, as it does now. The solution then, as now, to all problems was more bubbles, more spending, more deficits. So we have the implosion tech bubble: And what does Krugman want to create, to fix it? Why, create a housing bubble... Well, at least we know now how that advice played out.

There is one major problem with putting houses of card back together - they tend to fall...over and over. And while abundant liquidity in May and June served as an artificial prop to return European core and PIIGS spreads to previous levels merely as mean reversion algos took holds, the second time around won't be as lucky. CDR's Tim Backshall was on the Strategy Session today, discussing the key trends in sovereign products over the past few months, noting the declining liquidity in both sovereign cash and derivative exposure (we will refresh on the DTCC sovereign data later after its weekly Tuesday update). Yet the most interesting observation by Backshall is the declining halflife of risk-on episodes, which much like the SNB's (now declining) interventions, are having less of an impact on the market, as ever worsening fundamentals can only be swept under the carpet for so long before they really start stinking up the place, and indeed, as Tim points out at 5:30 into the interview, even the IMF now realizes that soon the eventual second domino will fall, and it is better the be prepared (via the previously discussed infinitely expanded credit line), than to have to scramble in the last minute as was necessary in May. In other words, the storm clouds are gathering and only fools will invest in risk asset without getting some additional clarity on what is happening in Europe. The bottom line as Backshall asks is: "do they default now or default later." And that pretty much sums it up. Buy stocks at your own peril.

In our last primer we looked at how money is created and destroyed in our fractional reserve banking system. We examined the implications of this process on inflation (which buoys asset prices like real estate) and deflation (which crushes asset prices).
In that primer I suggested that one of the main catalysts for a contraction in the money supply would be a decline in real estate prices which become self-feeding. This will dampen demand for mortgages and home equity lines of credit, the two largest generators of bank-created money, and will also cause people to save and pay off their debts as they no longer feel as wealthy. This has the effect of 1) Shrinking the aggregate money supply, and 2) Slowing the velocity of money. In this primer we will examine the question of how fairly valued Canadian real estate really is. We will use quantitative measures that are universally accepted to examine this question, rather than the qualitative fluff that is rampant in most discussions of real estate values.

Vix posted a very key bullish reversal ouside the lower bollinger band. Over the last two years, this has been a bearish signal for equities 100% of the time. In January the top in price lagged the low in Volatility by 7 business days, and the lag was 10 business days in April. Buyers beware, you have one or two weeks of fun, and after that comes a strong bearish move which will take the market lower than 1,000 in S&P futures. We will be very carefully following bearish divergence for equity indices to confirm this major signal.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 07/09/10

"I can’t remember a time in my 23 years in the market when there was so much confusion and uncertainty about the outlook. As the monetary catastrophe unfolds gradually, some days things look a little brighter, then the sheer enormity of the problem becomes only too apparent once again. Sentiment keeps flipping between optimism and pessimism, but the debt bubble just gets bigger! Noel Gallagher wrote “These are crazy days, but they make me shine”, and that sounds like a good enough motto for trying to invest right now (fingers crossed). The silver price has started to trade differently and it appears that BIG MONEY is moving in to the metal (at long last) and fighting the Cartel. There is evidence that the supply of physical silver is getting tight and it could be the beginning of a major upward move in the price." - Paul Mylchreest's Thunder Road Report